Faculty of English Language and Culture, Guangdong University of Foreign Language Studies, Guangzhou 510420, China
Abstract: | As the subsystem of human natural language, numeral is not only an important window to pry into the mindset and culture of a nation, meanwhile, due to its specialty in morphological, syntax and semantics, it has always been drawing the high attention of linguists. As the organic part of numeral system, particles for numerical approximation are frequently used in Mandarin Chinese, and their usage is rather complicated. There have been fruitful achievements about the research on such linguistic phenomenon, but controversies have also never ceased. Under the theoretical framework of formal linguistics, this paper mainly explores the syntactic distribution and semantic interpretation of the particle for numeral approximation lai in modern Mandarin Chinese. It is demonstrated that syntactically, whether suffixed behind numerals, numeral-classifier, or just classifier, lai, as a bound morpheme, always functions upon the whole phrase ahead, but it just semantically associates with its immediately adjacent digit word or classifier. Semantically, this paper ascertains the value of lai as λxλy[(x-10^y×20%)~(x+10^y×20%)] when it follows a numeral, which is evidenced by various kinds of numerals and adequate explanation, and in the meantime, it verifies that the aforementioned semantic model is also in accordance with the case when lai suffixes a numeral-classifier or classifier by analogy. Through the syntactic-semantic interface analysis on the particle for numeral approximation lai, this research is likely to deepen people’s understanding about the whole numeral system, thereby facilitating the study on the ontology of human natural language, and at the meantime, it may play a positive role in the enhancement of Chinese-foreign language teaching and artificial intelligence. |
Keywords: | Particle for Numerical Approximation; lai; Formal Syntax; Formal Semantics; Analogy |
DOI: | 10.57237/j.cll.2023.02.003 |
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